Work hard, lives restricted, old diaries say

Thursday, January 12, 2012

From the collection of Polly Cote Cate Langdell, seated left, and her husband Zaph, standing, right, posed for this photo with brothers and sisters-in-law.

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Photo from the collection of Polly Cote Cate and Zaph Langdell at their stove. Cate's diary records that she made many pies in the stove, sometimes a dozen or two in one day.

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From the collection of Polly Cote The house where Cat and Zaph Langdell lived for many years is now the site of the Milford Post Office. In the photo the house is between Milford's Episcopol Church, on the right, and the Methodist church, on the left. See the boat on the river. Their son George bought the row boat in 1896 and would rent it for 30-50 cents. Cate's diary mentions more than 100 times people taking the boat up the river.

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From the collection of Polly Cote Cate Langdell, seated left, and her husband Zaph, standing, right, posed for this photo with brothers and sisters-in-law.

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MILFORD – Polly Cote’s great-grandmother left her family some priceless heirlooms – nearly 65 years of diaries that serve as a window into the life of a local family in the late 19th and early 20th century.

In 1863 Hannah Catherine Loring Langdell, known as “Cate,” was only 22 and married with two little boys and still living in her father’s New Boston farm when she began to keep a diary. The family moved several times until 1905 when they settled into a three-family house located where the Milford Post Office is now.

Cote is transcribing the “tiny, tiny little diaries” into her laptop computer, and she is up to 1904, Her great-grandmother kept the diaries until the year she died in 1930, although there are a few inexplicable gaps in the diaries.

They are “chock-a-block full” of the family’s everyday activities, she said, and the Langdell’s lives were busy, orderly and somewhat humdrum.

“There is so much historic information on how people actually live,” she said. “I go on (transcribing) for years, and it’s so boring,” with entries about nothing except the weather and housework – “washing, making pies. Then all of a sudden it becomes very interesting.”

One surprise was her great-grandmother’s frequent mentions of suicides in the late 1800s – all women. Cote noticed they seemed to happen every 18 months or so.

One probable suicide was a friend of Langdell’s, the daughter of a Mr. Babcock, a minister. The woman was perhaps 30 years old and went for a walk and disappeared, said Cote.

“Police searched and searched and dragged the river every day for a week until news spread that they had found the body on the river’s north side. Langdell knew her well and lamented” over her death.

“I get into one of these stories and I can’t give it up. I’ve got to find out” what happened, Cote said.

There were other suicides of women her great-grandmother knew, but unfortunately “she never gets into the reasons,” said Cote.

But dramatic episodes were few and far between. To judge by her diaries, Cate Langdell’s life was filled with an endless round of housework, interrupted by visits from friends and relatives. Frequent diary entries say she is tired or not feeling well.

“She works very hard, is exhausted at night, and as she gets older it takes a toll,” wrote Cote in a summing up of the nearly first 40 years of the diaries.

Langdell did all her own sewing, made her own soap and clothes-washing fluid. Every Monday, week after week, she writes that she did the washing.

The diaries show how severely restricted were most women’s lives: They couldn’t vote or even have a checkbook and they went from their fathers’ houses to their husbands’ houses.

“Always, always it was the men” who handled town affairs, said Cote.

Cate Langdell’s contribution to civic life was her “Election Day” cake for Town Meeting and there is a recipe for it in her diary, along with recipes for sausage, sweet pickles, sponge cake, railroad cake, fruit cake, muffins, cream cookies and buns.

There is also a recipe for clothes-washing fluid, which required boiling for a half hour, then settling and straining through a cloth before putting the concoction in jars or bottles. Cote adds an editor’s note for the washing fluid and for a recipe for a bed-bug solution: “Don’t try this.”

When Cote began reading the diaries she was surprised by all the mentions of people who came to the Langdell house. It was not until she had read through a couple of years’ worth that she caught on that her great-grandparents were selling things – pies, bread, apples, potatoes, butter, made by Cate Langdell.

“It took me a long time to realize why all the people were coming and going,” she said.

The entry for New Year’s Day of 1864, for example, mentions that Langdell made 25 mince pies, far more than even a large extended family could be expected to eat.

In the meantime her husband, Elzaphen, called Zaph, was out buying and selling oxen, going as far as East Boston, a three-hour trip in those days. He was often gone for days at a time.

Zaph also kept a sporadic journal and Cote adds his entries under those of his wife. All Zaph usually mentions is what he purchased and its price. And despite a wide circle of friends and relatives, Langdell apparently suffered from his absences, at least when she was young.

In the diary entry of Sunday, March 1, 1863, “a very stormy day,” she writes that “Zaph has been at home all day for the first time for a long while, and I think that it would seem like home if he could stay at home more.”

Comments like that are rare and even rarer are any mention of domestic conflicts., although on March 21 1963 she notes that “Zaph and I have just had a squabble and if he is mad he is a bigger fool than I ever give him credit for being, but it will all pass.”

On the whole, though Cote said her great-grandmother “never says anything bad, cross or mean about anyone or any event” and “is very sympathetic to people’s troubles.”

Only twice, said Cote, did she seem irritated with her husband, once when she was busy around the house and reported that Zaph had been running about the neighborhood all day. “Another time she feels his haying should be done better the next year.”

It was a time of cooperation “when everyone helped everyone else,” said Cote. The men would help each other with the slaughtering of pigs and cows, for example, and then Zaph would take the meat to sell in Manchester stores.

The diaries begin in 1863, but the only references to the Civil War are mentions of men Cate Langdell knew who enlisted in the Union Army.

The war “was sort of remote” for a woman living on a farm with two little boys to take care of, said Cote.

Also surprising, she said, were the number of horse and buggy accidents that occurred when horses bolted and people were tossed out of their carriages.

The diaries mention five or six accidents, including one that killed a woman and child and severely injured the woman’s husband.

In May of 1896 Cate’s son, George, found an unusual way to make some extra money.

He bought a rowboat “and everyone heard about it and wanted to row up the river,” said Cote. George Langdell charged 25 cents a ride and couples, even single women and several prominent citizens, including Charles Emerson and Fred Wadleigh, rented the boat.

“I counted more than 100 references to the boat,” said Cote. “In 1904 people were still rowing and renting the boat.”

George was Cate Langdell’s third child, born when she was keeping a diary, but it contains no mention of the pregnancy until on Aug. 22, 1870, Cate writes that she has “another little son, born this morning.”

The only hints were her complaints of not feeling well during the month before the birth and mentions of someone else, perhaps a hired girl, doing the clothes washing and ironing.

Polly Cote’s mother, Constance, acquired the diaries in 1977 and read them all, and then in 1998 Cote began transcribing them into her laptop computer, and she now works on the diaries every evening after work and was happy to have five hours New Years Day to work on them.

Cote, who is 70, never knew her great-grandmother, who died in 1930, but she is thrilled to find mentions in the diaries of relatives she knew when they were in their 70s.

What will Cote do with the diaries and her transcription? Maybe write a book, she said, but just reading them is fully absorbing right now.

As her own mother said when the little books came into her possession in 1977, “Of all the novels, stories and biographies I have read in my lifetime, none can compare to the human drama and pathos that unfolds from what would appear to be just a hard-working humdrum existence.”

Kathy Cleveland can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 21, or kcleveland@nashuatelegraph.com.